5 The Old, Old Tree

This is About The Old, Old Tree I knew enough about the Catskill Mountains to know that when the summer came, they were covered with people. Although Greatgrandfathers farm was somewhat remote, still hikers and campers and hunters and fishermen were sure to wander across it. Therefore I wanted a house that could not he seen. People would want to take me back where I belonged if they found me. I looked at that tree. Somehow I knew it was home, but I was not quite sure how it was home. The limbs were high and not right for a tree house. I could build a back extension around it, but that would look silly. Slowly I circled the great trunk. Halfway around the whole plan became perfectly obvious. To the west, between two of the flanges of the tree

that spread out to the roots, was a cavity. The heart of the tree was rotting away. I scraped at it with my hands; old, rotten, insect-ridden dust came tumbling out. I dug on and on, using my axe from time to time as my excitement grew.

With much of the old rot out, I could crawl in the tree and sit cross-legged. Inside I felt as cosy as a turtle in its shell. I chopped and

chopped until I was hungry and exhausted. I was now in the hard good wood, and chopping it out was work. I was afraid December would come before I got a hole big enough to lie in. So I sat down to think. You know, those first days, I just never planned right. I had the beginnings of a home, but not a bite to eat, and I had worked so hard that I could hardly move forward to find that bite. Furthermore it was discouraging to feed that body of mine. It was never satisfied, and gathering food for it took time and got it hungrier. Trying to get a place to rest it took time and got it more tired, and I really felt I was going in circles and wondered how primitive man ever had enough time and energy to stop hunting food and start thinking about fire and tools. I left the tree and went across the meadow looking for food. I plunged into the woods beyond, and there I discovered the gorge and

the white cascade splashing down the black rocks into the pool below. I was hot and dirty. I scrambled down the rocks and slipped into the pool. It was so cold I yelled. But when I came out on the bank and put on my two pairs of trousers and three sweaters, which I thought was a better way to carry clothes than in a pack, I tingled and burned and felt coltish. I leapt up the bank, slipped, and my face went down in a patch of dogtooth violets. You would know them anywhere after a few looks at them at the Botanical Gardens and in coloured flower books. They are little yellow lilies on long slender stems with oval leaves dappled with grey. But that's not all. They have wonderfully tasty bulbs I was filling my pockets before I got up from my fall. "I'll have a salad type lunch," I said as I moved up the steep sides of the ravine. I discovered that as late as it was in the

season, the spring beauties were still blooming in the cool pockets of the woods. They are all right raw, that is if you are as hungry as I was. They taste a little like lima beans. I ate these as I went on hunting food, feeling better and better, until I worked my way back to the meadow where the dandelions were blooming. Funny I hadn't noticed them earlier. Their greens are good, and so are their roots– a little strong and milky, but you get used to that. A crow flew into the aspen grove without saying a word. The little I knew of crows from following them in Central Park, they always have something to say. But this bird was sneaking, obviously trying to he quiet. Birds are good food. Crow is certainly not the best, but I did not know that then, and I launched out to see where it was going. I had a vague plan to try to noose it. This is the kind of thing I wasted time on in those days when time was so important. However, this venture